A THOUSAND WORDS - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward's blog on pictures, plants, politics and whatever else is on his mind.

Death Does Not Take A Holiday (Canada Day)

Sunday, July 02, 2006

I am cheating as today's blog I wrote yesterday. And I am writing it today (yesterday) so I can justify the headline title above. In March, 1994. Vancouver Magazine art director Tom Brown asked me to photograph the city morgue at the Vancouver General Hospital. I decided I was going to avoid the big toe peaking from a body on a slab with the attached tag and the impersonal number that death brings to a human being that was. I decided, instead, to treat the place as a clean, sterile room that would suggest the surgical tools of the trade. They asked me what I needed. I told them I wanted them to wet the floor. This they did. And I snapped this picture using the sharpest film known to man (and woman), Kodak Technical Pan that resolves in excess of 200 lines per millimeter.